Imposter syndrome: AP has gotten into my head

I vacillate between a serious case of imposter syndrome and the certain knowledge that I know what the hell I'm doing. Pretty much daily. Maybe even hourly, sometimes. This whole teaching AP thing has me twitchy, like I'm doing something I ought not to, like I have no idea what I'm doing (which is sometimes the case), and then... I look at the work I've put in over the last almost four decades, and duhhh. I do know what I'm doing. The technical stuff --the College Board website-- still has a lot of mysteries. But do I honestly need most of it? I feel guilty I'm not using the whole damned thing, but then... my stuff is good stuff, and I don't need canned lessons for my students. That is not teaching. 

I joined a couple of Facebook groups, one for AP Language and the other for AP Lit. In both, there are hundreds of teachers --and I'm pretty sure I'm giving some of them a little more credit than they seem to deserve-- who are panicky about pacing, about trying a book without a received prompt for the writing, about just every damned thing. And I'm not panicky-- and that's one reason I am swinging from the chandelier at some points. We've been told a gajillion times that we don't have to use the same texts-- yet these people are all force-marching their students through Frankenstein, Hamlet, "The Yellow Wallpaper" and so on. I do none of those. I don't get frazzled about not having the decades of past "exemplar papers" for my students to pore over. What they read is not nearly as important as the close reading skills they should develop. I want my kids to have an authentic voice, a true/ unique insight, and to be able to write cogently. These yahoos are baking the AP cake, and wondering why their students are disengaged. Why they write poorly. And why they seem to only be doing what needs to be done with the test as a goal. In short, they are not good students; they are becoming good test takers.

Ah, there's the issue. The test. If I'm teaching lifelong writers and readers, thinkers and questioners, the test DOES NOT FREAKING WELL MATTER. It only matters because they are caught in the AP pipeline, because offering AP courses makes our school rank better. And, maybe, one or two will achieve the kind of test scores that will get them out of taking a course or two. Or not-- many colleges will now give them credit, but not use the test scores as replacement anyhow. Yes, the rigor of the requirements that AP expects (!?) will serve them well, but if I've been doing my job as a dual credit instructor, then that rigor is already there. I expect a lot (students always say there's "too much work" but it was worth it), and they don't get away with handing in garbage. I don't want to waste time reading half-assed efforts, so I don't accept anything less than an honest attempt. 

But then, I get reading these social media posts and wonder if I'm missing something. If I, by following my own syllabus (that was accepted by the CB), am doing my students a disservice. Then, the wishy-washy stomach-churning doubt creeps in. But I'm not a fan of leading kids to the test. I won't say "teaching to the test" because I'm entirely convinced that these people are not teaching. They are, at best, facilitating. They use the lessons as programmed on the website. They show the daily videos (which are pretty much all awful), they use the progress checks and so on-- all online from the CB. One of my students, after watching a couple of videos, told me that I would have done a much better job in half the time. I took it as a compliment. 

It should be validating to hear that from a student. But I have these waves of niggling doubt, and I have not felt this way since the first years of teaching. I'm quite confident in my skills to teach my courses. What all this AP hoorah has done is make me unsure about whether I'm doing things that match the test. 

I'm not here to match the test. I'm here to help kids become critical readers, writers, thinkers-- good humans, with skills that help them express their own perspectives. NOT the "suggested/acceptable" rote prompt-dreck. 

One teacher (again, really?) asked for suggestions for excerpts of memoirs to use. I suggested Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and Lamott's Bird by Bird; my students will be reading the entirety of both, not just selected chapters, but then they will be focusing in on threads or themes that the authors have chosen to follow. The teacher replied with "are there prompts for these?"-- I wrote back that the prompts should be easy enough to develop (thinking, omg, this person is a teacher???), if the students were focused on the rhetorical choices the authors make and whether those choices lead to a convincing piece of writing. Duh. That is the whole point of learning how to read and write critically; the students should be pushing their own cart, not responding to a canned prompt-- that only leads to a poor effort that the student can't even own. And the prompt is one that their own teacher did not even create. How do they assess the essay? They use the CB rubrics (which is not terrible, but if you didn't make the rubric, then you need to understand what is being looked for, deeply and honestly). Do these teachers even know if their kids are learning?

Prompts are not always helpful; they limit the scope of what students "see" in a piece of writing. I want to know what they notice, what worked for them as individual readers, and what didn't work, as well-- in short, become capable of sustaining a critical analysis founded in original thought and insight. If we feed them pablum, they don't develop teeth. 

And they need teeth. Not only because of The Test (there are guiding questions given to them, but not a full prompt), but because of LIFE. In this age of AI-generated every damned thing, they will need to be very critical of what they read, watch, listen to, and then respond with intention and curiosity. And skepticism. Lots of it. This should be the end-game. 

At any rate, maybe I need to leave these Facebook groups. These people are either a/ incredibly boring teachers (or facilitators of canned material), or b/ running so damned scared of the parents/students/colleges/public/administrators, they don't feel confident in their own skills. 

I am neither. Most of the time, anyhow. I'm not scared of any of those people or groups-- I just don't want to mess it up. I just have to shut the negative talk off, and remind myself why I am doing what I do. It feels like the College Board has become the Great and Powerful Oz of education, and frankly, I have an ample supply of ruby slippers. And even if I didn't have, remember-- Dorothy could have gone home any time she chose. She just needed to claim it.

Have a good one, folks. Thanks for listening. I feel better. =)

Hug your favorite people tightly. We all need the human connection.

C